SATURDAY 7th
Galatians 2:15-21
NIV (v16) – ‘. . . know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.’
ESV (v16) – ‘. . . yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.’
We return again to the same subject from yesterday, for we discover in these verses exactly what was the ‘other gospel’ that the Galatian believers were deserting Christ for, and it is that having accepting the gospel and receiving Christ by faith, they were being persuaded by the ‘Judaizers’ to return back to the law. In Galatians 3:1 Paul asks them, ‘O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’ In chapter 5:7 he asks them, ‘You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth?’
The ones who had bewitched them and as a result who had also hindered them were those who were telling them that it was the law that mattered, and that they need to return to the Old Testament law of Moses to be right with God. And Paul is telling them that to be doing that was a backward step, because the law did not and could not save an individual, this can only come about by faith in God. The gospel is not about the law, it must always be about Jesus. To make his point he goes further back than the law, he points to Abraham, and tells them that faith is linked not to the law but to the promise made to Abraham which was that through his seed, all the nations of the world would be blessed. And we know, and the Galatian Church knew that that seed which would lead to the nations of the world being blessed was none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. And when God spoke this to Abraham, and Abraham responded by believing, we are told (and Paul re-echoes it) that Abrahams faith was counted as righteousness, it placed him in a right and perfect standing before God. This is found in Genesis 15:6 ‘And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.’ (and re-echoed by Paul in Galatians 3:6 ‘. . . just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness . . .’) So, Paul is wanting to steer the Galatians back from the law and toward Jesus and the Cross. He is not saying that the law doesn’t matter, he is not pushing it to one side and saying forget it, what he is saying is that the law will never save a man or woman, this can only come about through faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who has fulfilled the law on our behalf.
See if we were to be relying on the law for our salvation, and in our keeping of it, we would be useless and hopeless, for we would be constantly failing and falling, we would be seeking to work out our salvation, but instead we come to the one who has done the doing for us, and we come to him by faith, believing and trusting in his complete and finished work at Calvary, simply to the Cross I cling.
In the same letter, Paul says that the law is like a guardian or a school master, (Galatians 3:24) it helps us to see where we are going wrong, it is a moral and spiritual compass for us, it helps us to see that we fall short of the glory of God, it helps us to recognise that we have transgressed and are sinners, but it can never save us, instead it should help point us to the one who can, and he is the one who is the seed of Abraham, he is the one of whom the angel said would be called Jesus, for he would save his people from their sin, he would be the one from whom out of all the nations of the world would be blessed.
Among many things we can learn from this today, to me the most important is that we must never deviate (or as Paul has put it be bewitched by others to turn away) from the Cross, the message of the Cross, and the man who hung upon the Cross, this is what we needed to hear and still need to hear and it is what the unbelieving world needs to hear.
This will lead us to where we will turn to tomorrow, Galatians 4:4